Friday, January 07, 2005

POGO Blog catches AP misrepresenting the cost to taxpayers of the disastrous and pointless F/A-22 Raptor:

This AP article seriously understated the F/A-22 Raptor's price tag. The article says that "Raptors cost approximately $133 million each." As we said in the recent post...The latest acquisition numbers show the F/A-22 development and manufacturing program will cost $71.7 billion for 279 aircraft – or about $257 million per copy. If the program is sliced by $10.5 billion, the 180 F/A-22s will cost about $340 million each.

That's a very, very large increase in costs - especially for an unnecessary plane that doesn't work properly - and POGO deserves a lot of credit for predicting it way back in 1998.

Some of you may have read the despicable David Holcberg's recent commentary, in which he argued that the US should not give a penny to tsunami victims, "because the money is not the government's to give...and has to be extorted from an American taxpayer first."

Obviously, Holcberg is being foolish, in that he's pretending to know what the taxpayers' wishes are. In fact, the majority of Americans support sending aid overseas, especially in response to a disaster of this magnitude; in the present case, nearly half of American households have added to the federal funds with donations to charity out of their own pockets.

I'd argue that tsunami relief isn't a misuse of taxpayer funds; it's an example of why we should pay taxes...so that we can respond instantly (or eventually, in BushCo's case) to emergencies at home and abroad.

There are Americans like Mr. Holcberg and Michael Savage who don't agree with me, and that's fine. But personally, I don't support the use of my tax dollars for stupid, money-burning projects like the Raptor. And now, it looks as though the cost of one Raptor - one faulty, unproven, unnecessary, dangerous, insanely expensive jet fighter - may end up being roughly equivalent to the entire amount the US government is sending for tsunami relief.